


Give Me Your Answer, Do

by Zai42



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Blood, Body Horror, F/F, Knifeplay, Monsters, Other, Post Season 4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:34:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22536340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zai42/pseuds/Zai42
Summary: Before the world ends, the Distortion makes a friend or enemy or ally.
Relationships: Alice "Daisy" Tonner/Helen
Comments: 16
Kudos: 45
Collections: The Magnus Archives Rare Pairs 2020





	Give Me Your Answer, Do

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Amber](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amber/gifts).



It was a gamble, leading the blood-drunk monster that had been Daisy Tonner into the twisting hallways; there was every chance her mind was too consumed with the Hunt to be addled by the Spiral, but it seemed such a shame to leave her to the tender mercies of the powers at play in the Institute. Especially now, when things were just about to get fun. 

  
So now a hunter stalked her halls, eyes sharp and fangs sharper, each breath a low growl, jaws dripping. Helen felt a twinge of something human, deep in her core. 

  
"Could you find me?" she asked. She had no breath to be breathless, but she tingled with anticipation. "Even here, could you chase me down? Find my center and..." She trailed off with a cackle, hysterical laughter bubbling up in her from somewhere that wasn't quite real. Daisy's fingers twitched. Helen imagined them finding the joints between her bones, cracking her open like prey upon a rock. "Are you going to hunt me down, Daisy?"

  
Daisy snorted, her breath hot and reeking of blood and steel. "I'll find you," she said, each word plucked carefully from between oversized canine teeth. "I will _find_ you."

  
Helen shivered, laughter that wasn't her own echoing down her hallways. "Ooh, hunter," she said, and Daisy shattered a mirror with one swipe of her fist.

  
Helen felt it ripple through her and gasped, her laughter stuttering but not quite dying. "Hunter," she said again. Daisy stepped through the broken remnants of the mirror, glass that didn't exist crunching beneath her feet.

* * *

If she looked with her eyes, all Daisy could see were the looping corridors, sprawling on forever before her. But she could smell it, the living core of it, the faintest whiff of humanity deep beneath all the distraction of the hallways. She prowled towards it. She had nowhere else to go.

  
"What will you do if you find me, hunter?" 

  
She spoke, sometimes. The thing that lived in the mirrors. Helen. Daisy ignored her, mostly. Her voice echoed strangely and didn't give away where she might be lurking, and Daisy had little interest in what she was saying. 

  
"What do you think will happen?"

  
Daisy tore a long strip of not-quite-canvas from a painting, revealing the dripping, yellowed pathway behind it. Laughter surrounded her.

  
"What will become of us if you come to me?" Helen mused. "You could hunt your prey to your heart's content, I suppose. Run in circles forever."

  
Daisy let out a shuddering breath. "Come here," she said. For a moment it was still, and she wondered if Helen hadn't heard her. Then:

  
"Why?" Helen asked. She sounded almost hesitant. Almost afraid. But not quite.

  
"Not gonna hurt you," Daisy said. "Don't want to be you, either." She paused. "But I could. Find you. Kill you. Wear you." _(Like a wolf skin, draped over her shoulders, a trophy transforming her.)_

  
Helen laughed again, and long fingers curled around Daisy's bicep. "All right, hunter," Helen purred. Her lips were pressed to Daisy's ear, and her voice wasn't coming from an angle that made sense. "Here I am."

* * *

Helen had expected Daisy to be lying about not hurting her, but Daisy only cradled her cheek and leaned in close, burying her nose in the illogical crook of her neck and breathing in deep. "Basira was supposed to hunt me down," Daisy rumbled, her mouth working against the wallpaper texture of Helen's skin. "Why did you take me?"

  
Helen ran fingertips like knives down Daisy's back, sketching shallow cuts between her shoulderblades, running parallel to the knobs of her spine, humming thoughtfully. "I'm in love with you," she said, and Daisy let out an angry noise, the snarl of a panther, the hiss of a scorpion. Helen giggled. 

  
"Don't lie to me," Daisy said, low and sharp and dangerous. "I can smell it."

  
"I don't know how to do anything else," Helen replied. Daisy's fingers closed around her wrist, which was surprising given that Helen didn't think she had wrists at the moment. "You're interesting," Helen said, watching Daisy inspect the honed edges of her hand. "The world is about to become...interesting."

  
Daisy closed her lips over Helen's fingertip, blood welling up, staining her lips fairy-princess red. Helen could feel teeth clicking against bone, wondered if Daisy intended to rip the digit off entirely. "You wanted a pet hunter?" Daisy asked. Her tongue was dripping red. "A hungry, slavering monster who owed you one?"

  
"I didn't think that far ahead," Helen said. "I was just bored."

  
Daisy grinned, blood staining her teeth pink. "And stupid," she said. She ran her lips up Helen's arm, kissing her into something solid, cutting her mouth all to ribbons. "Now you have an angry hunter inside you."

  
Helen coiled an arm around Daisy's waist, pulling her closer, tilting her head back, throat exposed to teeth and lips. "We'll have so much fun together," she purred; her throat crunched in Daisy's jaws with a sound like a breaking mirror, and Helen laughed and laughed and urged the hunter's teeth to close over her again and again and again.

* * *

The slice of Helen's fingers into her stomach was the first real thing Daisy remembered feeling. The pain was sharp and cold and grounding and Daisy arched into it, hissing through her teeth. The knowledge that the Spiral couldn't kill her, not even here, hummed in her veins like a drug. A wild, unhinged cackle rose in her throat, and she wrapped herself around Helen's body and flipped them both dizzyingly backwards until they found a solid enough surface to lie on.

  
"Let me show you how to stab someone properly," Daisy breathed. Helen squirmed in her arms, flickered like static; Daisy gripped her wrist and guided one razor-sharp hand towards Helen's own breast, cutting her open with her own exposed bones. Helen made a high, hysterical noise and dug her fingers deeper on her own, until they pierced through her back and into Daisy once more, threading them together. 

  
Helen sighed, her voice the wind through rotted rafters. Her bonesaw hands twitched, illogical, shifting the geometry of Daisy's body where they were sunken in past the second, third, fourth knuckle. Daisy inched closer, lowered her face into the mad coils of Helen's hair, inhaled the scent of dust and crumbling plaster. Slowly, deliberately, she eased Helen's hand out of them, the noise it made slick and deafening in the endless corridors. "You hunt people here," she said, half question. 

  
Helen chuckled. "You could say that," she replied. "I am not as... _forward,_ as you are."

  
Daisy peered into the yellowed hallway over Helen's shoulder. The light flickered in a way that suggested a florescent bulb overhead, though there were no bulbs and hardly an "overhead" at all. The floors and walls coiled around each other like a snail shell, bending out of sight and continuing forever. No nooks or outcroppings to hide in, no place to find a moment of reprieve from the monster breathing down your neck. "You should show me, some day," Daisy said. She felt a bark of laughter bubble up and out of her, and in her arms, Helen grinned with all her teeth.

* * *

_The world ends, and all the doors are flung open in wild abandon, and when they meet the Archivist again, he sobs out something like laughter. "What did you do to her?" he asks, and they aren't even lying when they answer:_

_"I don't know who you mean."_

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Give Me Your Answer, Do (Podfic)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24283867) by [melangerubin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/melangerubin/pseuds/melangerubin)




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